Email Marketing for Doctors

email marketing

EMAIL MARKETING can be a great way for your medical practice to increase your patient volume and it is one of the most efficient medical marketing services on the market. However, in order to avoid falling into the SPAM category, its important that you take the time to build a thoughtful and informative Email Marketing Campaign that will benefit your readership.

here are several questions to ask yourself when considering starting a medical marketing email campaign:

How are you going to Grow your Mailing List? Are you collecting patient email addresses? Is there a sign up option on your website?

Why should you readership open your emails? What useful information are you giving them?

How can the Email Marketing Campaign be used to promote the brand you are aiming for?

Do the emails mirror branding and colors of your practice?

Can your email software track open rates click through rates, and other data vital to judging the success of your campaign?

Email Marketing for Doctors – What are the advantages?

Email marketing is an important part of patient engagement and has many advantages. The benefits include:

Repeat referrals. As a doctor, often your most likely future patients are your past patients. They are already familiar with your practice and have (obviously) had some kind of injury or condition which falls under your specialty. So why not keep communication open with them via an email campaign? This way you stay on their radar and are at the front of their mind next time they need medical treatment again.

Referring friends and family. Perhaps your past patients don’t require further medical treatment themselves, but their friends and family may. What better reference than a past patient to vouch for the quality of your services? This is why it’s important to keep communication channels open with patients and to stay visible. Email marketing for doctors is a cheap and efficient way to do this.

Affordability. Email marketing campaigns can be sent to thousands of patients at a minimal cost. In contrast to regular physical mail campaigns, email is of course free (although some email programs do charge a fee, often depending on the size of your mailing list).

Personalization. One of the great things about the recent increases in patient engagement technology is that information – such as the patients name and interests – can easily be tracked (obviously in accordance with HIPAA requirements). This means that your emails can be targeted and not come across as SPAM. For example, perhaps a past patient called “Susan” had previously expressed an interest in non-operative treatment for back injuries. This can easily be tagged in the system, then in future emails to Susan can be addressed to her as “Dear Susan”, plus include the relevant content she is interested in.

Collecting patient reviews. Email marketing for doctors can also be used to collect more patient review. It is expected that Google’s algorithm which determines which practices appear on the Google Map portion of search results factors in the number of position Google My Business reviews. Therefore, why not include an option in your email marketing campaigns for patients to provide more positive reviews? Read about Online Reputation Management for Doctors for more information.

Email Marketing for Doctors – Planning your Campaigns

Email Marketing can be a great way for your medical practice to increase your patient volume and it is one of the most cost-efficient medical marketing services on the market. However, in order to avoid falling into the SPAM category, its important that you take the time to build a thoughtful and informative Email Marketing Campaign that will benefit your readership.

Here are several questions to ask yourself when considering starting a medical marketing email campaign:

How are you going to Grow your Mailing List?

It’s an obvious point, but you can’t have an email marketing campaign without any email addresses to send to! There are many ways to build your mailing list, but as a physician practice or medical clinic the easiest is to start collecting patient emails (obviously in compliance with HIPAA regulations). This will form the basis of your mailing list. In order to add to it further, you can have a sign up option on your website, as well as your social media pages. There are also options of purchasing third party mailing lists, however we do not recommend this, because they usually have low-open rates which harms your open rate in general, leading to your emails frequently landing in patients’ “spam” folder.

Open Rates – Why should your readership open your emails?

You know how it is yourself – you receive hundreds of emails every day. It’s simply not possible to read every single email. So whether you realize it or not, you perform a form of mental triage to decide which emails to open and which emails to delete. Often the factor which determines whether or not we open an open is the relevance and usefulness of the information to us. So when creating your email campaign it’s important you think about what your readership need – or want – to read about. Are you providing them with interesting and useful content? Is the usefulness of the information immediately visible from the subject?

(Track the Open Rates and Click Rates, so you can see what your Mailing List is interested in)

How can the Email Marketing Campaign be used to promote the brand you are aiming for?

Your email marketing campaign should sync with all of your other online marketing activities. This includes the branding. Does the campaign use the same color scheme? Is it projecting the same message? For example, if you are trying to position your practice as the leading provider in your area of a new service, are you reinforcing this message with your email marketing campaign?

Can the content of the emails also be used on your website and distributed via social media?

At Red Castle Services, we write original content for doctors and medical clinics, namely two custom-written articles every month (e.g. “3 Questions to Ask yourself before choosing your next Urgent Care Center”). After going to the effort of writing such great content, it would be a pity not to get the most out of it! That’s why we recommend not just putting the content on your website, but also including it in your newsletter, and linking to it on all of your social media platforms. This also has a great knock-on effect on your medical seo campaign.

How to track the success of your email marketing campaigns?

Can your email software track open rates, click through rates, and other data vital to judging the success of your campaign? It’s important to track this information, else how can you track what your readership is interested in? For example, if one campaign about PRP had an open rate of 50%, whereas another campaign about pain medications had an open rate of 10%, then it’s clear that your readership is more interested in PRP, so that would suggest to create more content around this topic.

How can Red Castle Services help with Email Marketing for Doctors?

Want help creating an Email Marketing Campaign for your Patients? Red Castle Services specializes in this. It syncs with our Medical SEO services, which requires us to write great original content about your practice, which can then be included in the email marketing campaigns. The email marketing campaign also syncs with our Online Reputation Management services. So when considering email marketing for your practice, it’s important to consider how it fits in with your other online marketing activities, so that everything is working in harmony toward the same end goal and branding.